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Essentially every shop in the UK has a chip and pin reader. Contactless payment (with a home-grown card) is standard on the London underground. I assume it is only a matter of time before contactless payment spreads to the shops.

I suggest that you _not_ spend time thinking deeply about DRM: every minute thinking about DRM is a minute not spent coding up your project. If you can contact a sufficiently large audience then Kickstarter is worth trying. Otherwise you could offer updates. Both are ways of asking for money in advance for product/service later.

"The piece that everyone forgets about this is that while the raw mineral resources themselves have some value, they have another feature that is extremely valuable, which is that they are outside of a deep gravity well."

And so we deduce that the resources, outside of the deep gravity well, are only valuable to communities living outside the deep gravity well. Ie, nobody. There is nothing up there worth something to people _down_here_.

I believe that this is a highly non-trivial bootstrapping problem. You need unimaginable technologies in orbit (power satellites? nano-materials that can only be built in zero-gravity?) to make it worthwhile to go up there and start the process. However, nobody will come up with those technologies until there is a huge industrial base in orbit... So it is impossible to get started.

The organization says that the system "consists of an Intranet designed ultimately to replace the international Internet and to discriminate between ordinary citizens and the 'elite' (banks, ministries and big companies), which will continue to have access to the international Internet."

If that is accurate and if I follow your naming scheme correctly, in this case the "bad guys" want continued access to the wider world. It is the "ordinary citizens" who need to be "left alone" by the "good" guys. Did I get all that right?

Unfortunately, within the academic world, the quality of publications on your CV is determined by the perceived quality of the venue (e.g., high-impact journals, low-acceptance conferences, etc.), as opposed to the quality of the actual work getting published.

This is true and unfortunate, but there is a serious lack of more accurate means of measurement. I'm curious - what do you suggest as a better way to compare 400 candidates applying for 4 jobs? Don't forget the most important constraint: you are not an expert in any of their fields.